University of Iowa student Griffin Brown is anxiously awaiting Saturday night’s Iowa-Michigan Big Ten Championship football game.

The second-year is one of over 2,000 UI students who secured tickets to the game in Indianapolis on Thursday.

Brown, like hundreds of other UI students, received notice about the tickets in late September. Emails from Hawkeye Sports were sent out to student season ticket holders advising them to request tickets for the Big Ten Football Championship by Nov. 1. However, many other students have been left scrambling for tickets a week out from the game despite the email notification.

“I signed up within an hour once the email came out,” Brown said. “I don’t think there was a better way to tell the student body about tickets other than a mass email, but I think they could’ve sent more emails or sent it closer to the game.”

Bridget Crossett, UI assistant manager of ticket operations, said the email was sent early so everyone who made a request would know as soon as possible whether they would receive tickets or not.

“Anybody that submitted a request by the Nov. 1 deadline received an email on Nov. 28 confirming that we were able to get them tickets,” Crossett said. “Anybody that got their request by that Nov. 1 deadline is receiving tickets and will be emailed their tickets Dec. 2.”

The UI has 2,500 student tickets to distribute for the game, including marching band members who will attend the game, Crossett said. The requests were open to both general season ticket holders and student season ticket holders.

Unlike regular UI football tickets, the Big Ten Championship tickets are unable to be transferred to other students because the game is a third-party event taking place at a venue that is not Kinnick Stadium.

“There’s still unofficial ways to get tickets in the hands of other people, like forwarding the email that has the link to the tickets or sending a screenshot, but those are not secure ways to receive tickets,” Crossett said.

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Students who received tickets paid $50 to secure their spot at the championship game. Among resale sites and student-to-student sales, however, prices are seen to have surged well past $100.

On TicketiQ, a ticket resale website, the cheapest price for a seat at the game was $371, as of Wednesday. The business tweeted on Nov. 28 that Saturday’s game is the most expensive Big Ten Championship game in the past decade.

Andy Luu, a UI first-year student, said he had no clue there was an email sent out because he did not have season tickets this football season. Season tickets sold out before he could buy the package, he said, and navigating purchasing tickets through other, less secure methods has been a challenge.

“All year, I got my football tickets from the Iowa website. But for the game, I can’t do that. I have to buy it from random people,” Luu said. “There are a lot of people who are scamming for money, and this time you can’t transfer so it’s even worse. I don’t know who to trust.”

While he would love to go to the game, Luu said he can’t risk spending hundreds of dollars just to get scammed.

“When people sold tickets for the Penn State game, it was $100, which was understandable,” he said. “But on Facebook and other sites, it’s $200, $300, I even saw $500. I’m a student. I can’t do that.”

Luu said he wishes that the opportunity to receive tickets had been extended to more students and had been made more public, he said.

“I feel like it was a really limited opportunity, especially with it being season ticket holders first and others not hearing about it,” Luu said. “A lot of students don’t check their email every day too, so it’s easy to miss.”